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I thought this alternative view to mental health is worth sharing. I found some interesting views in here, food for thought and links to people whose work can possibly explain some of the things I have been dealing with. Hope you enjoy.

I am happy that I quit. The reasons I drank are still popping up and asking for attention, but I guess that comes with the territory of being sober; the need to deal. It has been difficult but Bach-remedies, looking for a psychiatrist in my living area has helped me to come, well, at least above zero. What has changed is that I found hope. 🙂 I am not lost, I have issues to solve. That is a big difference. 🙂 While on that path, somebody (Jonathan Davis) was so nice to put this on the interwebs.

The Shamanic View of Mental Health — Waking Times

In November 2014 the peak psychology body in the UK, the British Psychological Association, released their new flagship report Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia. It was a watershed moment in the mainstream treatment of mental illness, containing statements such as this:

Hearing voices or feeling paranoid are common experiences which can often be a reaction to trauma, abuse or deprivation. Calling them symptoms of mental illness, psychosis or schizophrenia is only one way of thinking about them, with advantages and disadvantages. ~The British Psychological Association: Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia

With mental health problems reaching epidemic proportions in the UK and throughout the western world, this document reads as no less than an admission that the current model of mental health treatment has failed; and a cry for help to anyone with an approach that may be useful. There are indeed a great many cultures who have had, and still carry, a deeper understanding of mental illness. While these perspectives don’t fit within the boundaries of rationalist reductionism, this has little relevance to their efficacy.

From American Indian shamanism* to esoteric judaism, this concept has dominated for millennia. As it has now become clear, western civilisation is unique in history in it’s failure to recognise each human being as a subtle energy system in constant relationship to a vast sea of energies in the surrounding cosmos.– Dr Edward Mann, Sociologist

What Is The Shamanic View Of Mental Health?

Broadly speaking any form of awareness around mental health that includes spiritual, mystic and/or mythic considerations could be included in a shamanic view of mental health. This ranges from ancient indigenous shamanic practices to yogic methods involving kundalini awakening, through to Jungian and transpersonal psychology (which draw heavily from ancient cultures). Jung, for example, characterised schizophrenia and psychosis as a natural healing process.

When conscious life is characterised by one-sidedness and false attitudes, primordial healing images are activated – one might say instinctively – and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists… Schizophrenia is a condition in which the dream takes the place of reality. – Carl Jung

Another foundation stone of this perspective is the phrase made famous by Joseph Campbell: ‘The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight’ (an idea borrowed from Jungian psychiatrist RD Laing). There has been a long history throughout human culture of people having mystical experiences, and then becoming ‘weller than well’ as Dr John Weir Perry put it. The key here is that in these instances the person completed a process that western medicine would have labelled as sickness and then medicated. They instead passed through it and went on to lead lives without relapse into ‘psychosis’, instead living a more fulfilled existence than if they had never gone though their temporary break with consensus reality. Throughout history there have been examples of people who have gone on to use their visionary insights, newly found drive and focus to create great social reform for the benefit of all.

Psychospiritual Crisis / Spiritual Emergence

Proponents of transpersonal psychotherapy, like one of its founders Prof. Stanislav Grof suggest that ‘spiritual emergence’ experiences are often misdiagnosed as psychosis and medicated unnecessarily. Grof sites 11 different types of spiritual emergencies, including the classic initiatory experience of the shaman, unitive experiences of oceanic oneness, kundalini awakening, the crisis of psychic opening, and the messianic experience common within what John Weir Perry called the ‘renewal process’.

Interpreted from this point of view, a schizophrenic breakdown is an inward and backward journey to recover something missed or lost, and to restore, thereby, a vital balance. So let the voyager go. He has tipped over and is sinking, perhaps drowning; yet, as in the old legend of Gilgamesh and his long, deep dive to the bottom of the cosmic sea to pluck the watercress of immortality, there is the one green value of his life down there. Don’t cut him off from it: help him through. – Joseph Campbell, Schizophrenia: The Inward Journey

John Weir Perry, who put these ideas into practice in a medication free facility called Diabasis, suggests these experiences are a dramatic re-ordering of the person’s psyche from a distorted state to an more ordered one. To me this is like cleaning a messy house, sometimes it needs to get messier in order to sort everything out. Perry also said that ‘it is justifiable to regard the term “sickness” as pertaining not to the acute turmoil but to the prepsychotic personality… the renewal process occuring in the acute episode may be considered nature’s way of setting things right.’ This is echoed by Jiddu Krishnamurti‘s statement that ‘it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’

The Problems Of Pathology, Symptom Suppression, Stigma and Trauma

Pathology: A fundamental difference between the approach of calling these experiences mental illness, psychosis or schizophrenia and ‘other ways of thinking about them’, is the very act of pathologising them. The labelling of something as a sickness, when working in the realms of the psychospiritual can have a dramatically negative effect on what happens next. Like a person experiencing an overwhelming psychedelic experience, a person in this kind of state is highly influenced by their surroundings including what they are told, for good or for ill. A suggestion that the experience is a sickness can become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Having been encouraged to see the voice, not as an experience, but as a symptom – my fear and resistance towards it intensified. Now essentially this represented taking an aggressive stance towards my own mind – a kind of psychic civil war, and in turn this caused the number of voices to increase and grow progressively hostile and menacing. – Eleanor Longden

Symptom Suppression: The next big challenge is symptom suppression. Critics of the current model of care (who now seem to include the British Psychological Association) argue that psychiatric medication merely suppresses symptoms.

Many people find that ‘antipsychotic’ medication helps to make the experiences less frequent, intense or distressing. However, there is no evidence that it corrects an underlying biological abnormality. Recent evidence also suggests that it carries significant risks, particularly if taken long term. – The British Psychological Association: Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia

Those of the shamanic or transpersonal persuasion go further in suggesting that medication tends to ultimately prevent the person from completing a natural experience such as the ‘process of renewal’ John Weir Perry describes. Instead this process keeps trying to complete itself and symptoms keep reappearing, and then drugs suppress it again in an endless cycle. It’s unsurprising that the phrase ‘you have a mental illness, and you will have it for the rest of your life’ is so often heard by people experiencing psychosis.

Stigma:

They [shamanic cultures] have a cultural context. The physiological crisis, although it’s difficult, it’s believed to be… they put it in a positive light. It’s something the person’s going to come out of and be stronger in the end, and have more abilities in the end. The other thing that’s a big advantage is – it’s not stigmatized. – Phil Borges, maker of upcoming film CrazyWise

Trauma: Thankfully, even in the western model there is a strong surge of recognition occurring around the fact that trauma and neglect in childhood (and in adulthood) can lead to serious mental health crisis.

We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again.Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave. – A Rwandan talking to writer, Andrew Solomon

The Bridge Between Two Worlds – Sickness or Acute Sensitivity?

Dr Joseph Polimeni states that ‘In most traditional societies those persons who were overcome by hallucinations in young adulthood were more often than not destined to become shamans’. If someone presented with symptoms we would call psychosis, the people of their tribe or village would send them for training with someone who had learned a level of mastery over the sensitivity that once overwhelmed them. Phil Borges states that ‘they have a mentor; they have somebody who has been through this process that can take and hold their hand and say listen, I know what this is all about and this is how you manage it’. In cultures around the world, before western civilisation the idea of schizophrenia as a disease was, quite simply, non-existent. The assumption was that a person experiencing the challenges known in modern times as psychosis was in fact experiencing things that were actually real, but only able to perceived by those who were gifted.

They have a community that buys into what they’ve gone through, and not only that, they have an outlet for their talents – and many of these people have specific talents that the normal person doesn’t have. – Phil Borges, maker of upcoming film CrazyWise

To me it is clear that we live in a culture that immediately labels these moments of crisis as sickness, and our culture has almost no level of acceptance for the people that go through it. When face to face with a person experiencing involuntary states of non-ordinary consciousness, most of us – to put it bluntly – just want them away from us. It’s almost as if we fear that ‘crazy’ is contagious and we want it quarantined. It’s unfortunate that this approach may be compounding the problem, however another way forward is re-awakening. When I look at a person in such a crisis, I see a future potential mentor for others. The more we can assist people in passing through their dark night of the soul, the more guides we will have with lived experience to help others come through in the future. In an upcoming article I’ll be writing about how shamanic training can assist people going through ‘spiritual emergency’.

For peer support and further information of this kind you can join The Shamanic View Of Mental Illness on Facebook.

About the Author

Jonathan Davis is an Australian writer focusing on shamanism and alternate modes of healing.

This article (The Shamanic View of Mental Health) was originally posted at Uplift Connect, and is reposted here with permission.

Well, I’ve been not wanting to write this for a very long time but ‘signs’ urge me to so here it goes…. 2 Years ago I had a solo sexual experience (how is that for an intro to a post?) which within seconds shocked me into an experience of feeling ‘my brother’ dying and me re-absorbing the atoms and energy of his body and mind / consciousness / spirit – I don’t know what, but the essence that would make him him in this world, not the eternal part. In this experience I was in my mother’s womb and my brother was actually a twin brother. The grieve, it was, overwhelming. Crushing me, crushing me. So, so, so…. pfffff…. no words there. The powerlessness still makes me cry now when writing this. And then the re-absorbing of the dying energy which was awful, sickening and I pushed and fought to keep it out but I could not and it hurt.

I can’t write this without letting the crazy out to explain it so here it comes: this was in uterus, when experiences where still felt fully and every atom of me moved with the flow of life and everything was Life and then he died. I think to understand now that later, when we come into this world we learn to not experience life as I did then. Or maybe I only did so because of this overwhelming happening. I don’t know. God it hurts to feel somebody dying, the life energy leaving, it was all so clear, so clear. And there was nothing I could do. I wanted to help and safe him, I could not and I felt so guilty because something said that if I had not survived, he would have lived. Or maybe that is what I made of it, maybe that is what my adult brain makes of it. I don’t know. But things fell into place and I wrote a mail about it to my therapist which I believe I never send. I mean, it is like this intro ‘hey I masturbated and then I had this epiphany’.

I still have the mail. This is what it says and I have added some stuff to it that I understand better now.

I think my search is complete. I have been looking into ‘why am I so strange, different, weird’ for years and I think I found the answer in an experience today. I experienced my twin brother dying while we were both unborn and that shaped my weirdness.

I have a tendency to pick up feelings from other people without knowing it. I describe that as lacking a layer in my aura. Within the twin experience I had it was very normal, in my original setting I was not complete as a person – I was two.

I can not remember well now but the mail reminds me also of an overwhelming experience of rivalry which I won, at his expense. This feeling very much ‘aligns’ with the basic feelings I have in contact with other people. Most normal people won’t notice but when I in therapy or on my own, let the crazy out, take off the mask, I can only admit that I ‘energetically’ for lack of another word, scan people constantly whether or not they will kill me, or I them. That is how basic it is. 😦 Sorry. I must sound like a monster. I feel a monster, I feel too much. I feel as if I am too much, too much, too overwhelming, too big to let space for others. So big I killed my brother. Once I did a therapy weekend and the question came up ‘If I exist, can the other exist?’ and my internal answer was NOOOOOOOO! The other way around does not work for me either; If the other exist, can I exist?’ That answer is negative too. So…. my basic idea of life is a sort of kill or be killed thing. Could be biologically very logical, don’t know. I never know if I am actually crazy or other people just don’t know that they are too.

I feel that the crushing overwhelm I experienced fucked up my core self and knowing what is mine and can be had. And the re-absorption of my dead brothers atoms and energy fucked up the energetic entries into my life. It feels like the rape experiences of later were only re-enactments of my brother dying.

The overwhelm also mixed with my feelings of self-preservation and it is very logical for me to assume now that the energetic base for my aggression towards others and my want/need/having this internal power which says ‘self destruct’ was born in that moment.

During this experience I was shown that I have had the possibility to energetically take up my brother totally and that would put me in contact with the spirit world forever. I would become a shaman by birth. I said ‘no thank you!’ since I very much feel like the spirit world is entitled to run their own affairs without me. Which is a stupid made up ego reply to the fright I felt :-(. The offer came with the knowledge that I would go crazy first, as in, of this planet crazy and then I would have to find my way back to the human world. Another one of those offers ‘you simply can’t refuse’.

I feel guilty that I am alive and always have felt so as long as I can remember. Guilt over killing my brother has always been there. I know I have no proof, other than my experience and my mother bleeding at one time around 3 months for a few days during pregnancy.

When writing the mail to my therapist I mentioned that I saw a relation between the death of my brother, my guilt and my tendency to sabotage relations. I remember that standing out very clearly but currently I have no, wow, I do have a connection to that thought: It is my ‘knowledge’ that I killed my brother with an overdose on female hormones. I would not even know if that is medically possible, have not looked into that. Looking at my hourglass shaped figure with extra filling in the right places I would say that I am ‘gifted’ (good word, looking at the double meaning of it) with high doses of female hormones. What I tend to do in relations is (s)mother. Like I castrated the bookstore man by thinking he’s a coaching project who needs to get clean to be a real person.

Another point I remember from my youth and it has always bugged me is that I had frequent nightmares at the age 3-8 I guess about my actual brother dying or falling into pits or whatever. There were 2 major themes: he was in danger and I could do nothing to safe him. There are a whole lot of explanations for it. There are people who could call it wish-dreams, not sure, possibly so. However to me then it felt real and life threatening and absolute horror. We lived in a neighbourhood with only boys so there was a lot of fighting going on. There is a story where my brother was attacked by 4 or more, can’t remember now, kids which were years older than he and I as a 4 year old jumped in and kicked, scratched, hit and screamed long enough to ward them off. Stories like these were not uncommon but always reported by the neighbours because the playground was in front of their house. Btw: that was in the time where fighting on the streets was ‘something kids do’. And the neighbour said things like ‘you seemed to cope so why interfere.’ Different times.

At the age of 4 I asked my mother why I was here on earth. I remember thinking about that a lot. I could not work it out. Ooh, hmmmm, I only learn now that this is not a surprise :-D.

When I get really sad and cry and lose myself my nose clogges up and I can’t breathe anymore, only through my mouth. This sets of this experience of chocking and dying and an overwhelming sadness which most of the time is not related to the actual issue. Another physical process that happens is wanting to throw up, get the ‘energy’ out of me. This nausea is what I also experienced in my, eh, experience of absorbing the dead energy of my dead brother.

Not sure if it is related but I have a simian line on my right hand of which people who read palms say that this happens due to trauma in the uterus. I am thinking now: is the Simian not the same as twin in English? Or? Well, anyway, the Simian line is where the heart and the head line of the hand are one. Yep, so that is about people who mix up heart and head and don’t know the difference. Sounds familiar.

I have written about this before in post about my Ayahuasca experience and I find it back now in this old mail; I have a tendency to put sadness between me and an experience in a way that ‘everything I love will die’. When I see something beautiful my first experience is happiness over the beauty and even before that has landed safely I put sadness there because I fear ‘it will be broken’, ‘it is not sustainable’, ‘I can not hold on to something that beautiful’, ‘he will not love me anyhow’, ‘she will not like me anyhow.’

Another point in the mail: opposite my tendency to ‘override’ others and well, basically see if I can ‘kill’ them, there is this tendency in me to ward of life energy from others. I have this what my GP calls ‘look about you that you do not need anybody’. 😦 Shit I am wishing I did not have to realise this, this, sadness.

And… awkward part of it; I have this gender confusion, sexual confusion… sometimes it is big and sometimes it is not. It might come as a surprise to you since I’m been moaning about the bookstore man (I soooo wish for a post where this person is NOT included) but that attraction is not physical. He’s actually ‘not my type’ as in ‘does not have what makes me tick’. Which, well, might be a good thing when looking at my history of falling for guys who did make me ‘tick’ but there is no need to even think about that.

Back to gender confusion. I remember the day I found out I was not a boy AND I NEVER WOULD BE. I was 10. I was angry, specifically with the last part. I had always, like, sort of been thinking ‘later’ things would ‘turn out ok with me’. No, I had the birds and the bees talk at age very young, 5 I think so I did know how it works. I just did not feel that way AND I did not want to accept it because my father was dominating the whole family and being a women was a thing to be scared off. I knew that already.

Gender confusion. My ‘epiphany’ came up when, in an orgasm I switched genders in my fantasy. This enormous sluice opened up and all these memories (‘memories’?) came flooding through me. FUCK.

A homeopathic doctor I have says my yang is too strong. When going through the experience I realised that this came with taking up the energy of my unborn brother.

So, how does this continue in my life. At that time I looked up surviving twin syndrome a little but let go because I had more pressing things on my mind as being addicted e.g. But ever since I got sober the twin thing has been pressing on me and it has become more apparent lately. It started with a book about surviving twin syndrome that was on the table in the bookstore and what I read immediately hit home. Like Craig Nakken’s book ‘Addicted Personality’ every sentence was true for me and every sentence was quotable. Obviously I did NOT buy it, thinking it was something I would deal with later.

At my 1 year anniversary the bookstore man offered me the choice of a book and at that moment I thought I need to pick this carefully because it will ring the bell for my 2nd year. That is a strange choice of words but that is what I thought. So…. I did not choose. I was chosen for by the bookstore man who gave me ‘Who am I’ a short version of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s look on life and what we call the individual and he said: ‘You should at least take this.’ The next time(s) I was at the store I tried to make a choice but could not but time and time again the books that I would pick up would be about ‘two’ or ‘black and white’ or ‘light and dark’, everything happened in pairs. I thought it was a preoccupation of my mind with my bookstore man issue but I think it worked out to be different. I wanted to take the twin syndrome book but I can not imagine this year to be focussed on that. I mean, if anything I should be focussing on money. NOW.

The last time I saw the bookstore man he was being very friendly to a female (girl?) friend of his and that hurt. Not so much the (girl)friend part of it but the me feeling excluded as being a person who he would like to be friendly to. Next day he FB-ed I was a ‘coaching project’ and we have not been in contact since. Falling in love is very educational and has NOTHING to do with reality :-(. It hurts. Well, on leaving the bookstore I walked home through the rain and entered a children’s bookstore on the way. When speaking with the children’s bookstore girl she said ‘My favorite book is from ‘Tonke Dragt’, ‘Stories of twin brothers’. That is when this little bell went of in my head thinking ‘this IS strange’.

I walked home and several tiny things like hearing about twins or seeing numbers like 11:11 and 22:22 have been happening ever since. These have been going on for some years now but are getting even more frequent now.

And now for the strangest part of the funny things. I went to bookstore 2 last Friday. There old bookstore man 2 is still on holiday but I got to speak with the ‘reserve’ bookstore man 2. He ended up giving me a book saying ‘This is the last book I read, it starts of pretty depressing but it ends up being absolutely beautiful, do you know it?’ And I looked at the cover and said; ‘This rings a bell, I have had this book in my hands several times but there is something with it, a darkness I didn’t really feel like getting into.’
‘Yeah, there is, take it, get it back to me some day, and read through the beginning, it is good.’

Something kept nagging while I went home, it kept nagging. I left home, it kept nagging. I did shopping and it kept nagging and then finally this quarter fell: THE BOOK USED TO BE MINE! I brought it to the 2nd hand book store a few weeks ago and gave it to the bookstore man 2. So from all the 15.000 – 20.000 books in that store, this reserve bookstore man, who knew nothing of this, hands me back ‘my own’ book. It is ‘Animal dreams’ from Barbara Kingsolver and the first page is about twins. I had taken it from a pile of a neighbour who was cleaning up her house and offered it for free on Facebook. When cleaning up my book cabinet I realised that I could not get past the darkness it emits so I was wondering if I would read it. So, I guess by now I should read it. 🙂

All in all anything I think to know about the vanishing twin syndrome and the ‘murder’ I accuse myself of could be related to the murder I do on, well, who know, the male part in me? The males around me? Whenever somebody in my environment mentions something about certain groups in society behaving criminal I tend to reply with saying: ‘95% Of the people in prison is male… so where do you think I put the blame for crime in this society?’ Yeah, I don’t normally make friends with that statement, but then again, there is no need to be friends with racists is there? Oooh, there still is some real nastiness there. I was thinking that contact with the bookstore man had made me see that men are human too. I guess I outsmarted this equalizing experiencing this by sexualising the relationship. I actually do know and experience that men are human (without the too.. :-)). It is just (?) that when I get down to the nitty-gritty I realise that in some modes of existence I do not accept that. I guess this has to do with me going into survival mode where everybody is enemy but men most.

My mail also mentioned another insight which I does not connect to me currently but it says ‘contempt is guilt projected onto the other.’ Does not ring a bell today. Which might be funny because I am thinking that some of you might think this whole post is about this but, what can I say, it does not ring a bell.

So…. I can write almost 3000 words on a 10 seconds experience :-). Letting it settle in me lasted way longer, longer. As I said, this happened almost exactly 2 years ago and I still do not know what it is about. I do think it links back to the dream of me having me as a baby. Where the black and white and the balance are very important.

And I do think this ‘concept of two coming from one going to one’ strongly connects to my view of the world, to my higher power if you will. My idea of a higher power is the creative energy, chaos if you will that shapes what is in this world. And as everything in nature there is no such thing as only growing who knows where, there is also the organising thing and the boundary thing. The yin and yang if you will. I actually came to this ‘division’ of the world through an Ayahuasca experience. I wrote, well, actually copied some stuff into the post ‘Yeah, I found what I was looking for!’ it is about male and female and balance.

Ghegheghe, the bookstore man on balance: ‘Pfff, balance, balance…. balance is overrated, balance is very boring and the experience comes when the unbalance happens.’ Aaah, shit, I’ll miss that. 😦 He, nor I, can, by no means afford to unbalance even more but I just love the, well, I guess the rebellious thinking in this. I guess this is where the attraction is attached. Well good to find out. 😦 I added ‘And the learning and shaping happens where we want or need to get back to understanding, integrating the experience and / or ‘the balanced place’.’ Or something like that.

Yesterday I was thinking about this while undressing. I have carried a black and white pebble in my pockets on and off for years now, dunno why, it seemed important after having read ‘The alchemist‘ from Paulo Coelho. The main person has black and white stones as well. A few weeks back I had been wondering why oh why they never fell out of my pockets as they did in his case, they would ‘point the way’. 🙂 And yesterday they did, for the first time in years. I am guessing I need to proceed my learning about the world in the direction of balance and the yin yang concept or I’m guessing the Peruvian / Ayahuasca organisation of the world. Guess I feel at home in this concept of two coming from one going to one. Ghegheghe, or maybe all religions are based on that. Let’s see.

To make a long post even longer. I got to writing this because my therapist said something about my animus not being strong or whatever – because I did not understand it very well. I do understand that there is something with boundaries and regulation and ‘discipline’ if you will out of balance big time. And the drifting in the chaos like I do in my life, I mean, even the way I write: long posts, no editing is unregulated, undisciplined. So where I do not understand the link back to Jung’s archetype thinking I do know something somehow. But not how to put it right. Bummer! 😦

I am happy that I quit, still in this way of pfffffff, looking back and thinking ‘thank God I do no have to do that again….’ I did have a drinking dream the other day. I think it came up with the post from Live to be continued where she mentions that she got trolled by somebody saying something which I translated into “If you can quit so easily, maybe you are not addicted’. I have that too. It is my weakest point. I tend to then point at my bank account and say ‘Now who’s not addicted?!’ But still, in my dream I wandered off. And the strange but informative thing was: I did not like the drink, I thought it smelled like poison, I drank it any way because of the feeling I was expecting to get from it because other people said so…. and because I did not want to have to stand up for myself. Did not want to fit out. If that is a word. Ooh, they also said that if I could quit so easily, I could have that drink, just one to try if it was really that bad. Isn’t it marvellous how dreams can just create people telling me exactly what I most obviously would like to hear?

I am getting into serious trouble with another addiction currently: chocolate. I am up to 100 to 150 grams and I start buying other goods too so I do not only have the chocolate in my basket. The other day I hid chocolate from my SIL. It is amazing. Very informative and it shames me but I solve that by acting like I am past caring. 😦 I don’t know why I need to cry now. I don’t know. I thought I would be tough and in control. I’m not. While there are few people in my life who actually as precise as I do know how damaging it all is. Well, dark 72% eco chocolate, but still… it is starting to replace my dinner.

I need: well, stop running and listen to my body. I am very tired, again I have not slept due to pain in my arm and shoulder because of the infection of the tendons and my heart is pumping like crazy to make up for, dunno what. My body said: easy on the chocolate, no more meat!!!!!!!!!! MEAT IS DEAD!!!! And more water, no tea, tea has an opinion, sends me places. No tea with herbal effects. (Did your body ever tell you that tea has an opinion?) Well, if this is what it is, I might as well do what my body says and see what it brings.

I want: things to be easy and me to have a lot of energy because, as I said my heart is pumping heavily in my chest because of being tired.

I take: Schuessler salts but not in the right quantities, not sure what I’m doing there. Because I do not sleep well I eat late and forget my Ayurvedic pills.

On discipline: non, apart from sitting down and meditating / listening to my body and funny enough I have made my bed for over a year now too. I never used to but when I got sober it somehow felt like a good thing to do and during that time I set my intentions to ‘sober’.

3 Things: this post. The beautiful dark blue candle which has been accompanying me during writing. And you, making it to this point in the post ;-).

It’s another long story to document what is going on. Some day it will make sense to me why I write it all down. 🙂